steam. I recoiled, Kasia’s hand clenching painfully on mine; we stared in horror. Jerzy’s skin had gone translucent, a thin greenish onion-skin layer, and beneath it nothing but black squirming masses of corruption that boiled and seethed. Like the shadows I’d seen beneath my own skin, but grown so fat they’d devoured everything there was inside him, even coiling beneath his face, his stained yellow eyes barely peering out of the grotesque, seething clouds.
“And yet you were prepared to ride blithely into the Wood,” the Dragon said. He turned. Prince Marek was staring at Jerzy, grey as a mirror; his mouth was a narrow bloodless line. The Dragon said to him, “Listen to me. This?” He gestured at Jerzy. “This is nothing. His corruption is thrice-removed, less than three days old thanks to the stone spell. If it were only four times removed instead, I could have cleansed him with the usual purgative. The queen’s been held in a heart-tree for twenty years. If we can find her, if we can bring her out, if we can purge her, none of which is remotely certain, she’ll still have lived twenty years in the worst torment the Wood can devise. She won’t embrace you. She won’t even know you.
“We have a true chance against the Wood here,” he added. “If we succeed in purging this man, if we destroy another heart-tree doing it, we shouldn’t use that opening to make a foolish headlong charge deep into the bowels of the Wood, risking everything. We should begin at the nearest border, cut a road into the Wood as deep as we can from sunrise to sunset, and then set fire-heart in the forest behind us before we retreat. We could reclaim twenty miles of this valley, and weaken the Wood for three generations.”
“And if my mother burns with it?” Prince Marek said, wheeling on him.
The Dragon nodded towards Jerzy. “Would you rather live like that?”
“Then if she doesn’t burn!” Marek said. “No.” He heaved a breath like there were iron bands around his chest. “No.”
The Dragon’s mouth compressed. “If we were able to so weaken the Wood, our chances of finding her—”
“No,” Marek said, a slash of his hand, cutting him off. “We’ll bring my mother out, and as we go we’ll lay waste as much of the Wood as we can. Then, Dragon, when you’ve purged her and burned the heart-tree that held her, I swear you’ll have every man and axe that my father can spare you, and we won’t just burn the Wood back twenty miles: we’ll burn it all the way to Rosya, and be rid of it for good.”
He straightened as he spoke, his shoulders going back; he’d planted himself still more firmly. I bit my own lip. I trusted Prince Marek not at all, except to please himself, but I couldn’t help feeling that he had the right of it. If we cut the Wood back even twenty miles, it would be a great victory, but only a temporary one. I wanted all of it to burn.
I’d always hated the Wood, of course, but distantly. It had been a hailstorm before harvest, a swarm of locusts in the field; more horrible than those things, more like a nightmare, but still just acting according to its nature. Now it was something else entirely, a living thing deliberately reaching out the full force of its malice to hurt me, to hurt everyone I loved; looming over my entire village and ready to swallow it up just like Porosna. I wasn’t dreaming of myself as a great heroine, as the Dragon had accused me, but I did want to ride into the Wood with axe and fire. I wanted to rip the queen out of its grasp, call up armies on either side, and raze it to the ground.
The Dragon shook his head after a moment, but silently; he didn’t argue any further. Instead it was the Falcon who made a protest, now; he didn’t look nearly as certain as Prince Marek. His eyes still lingered on Jerzy, and he had a corner of his white cloak pressed over his mouth and nose, as though he saw more than we did, and feared to breathe in some sickness. “I hope you’ll forgive my doubts: perhaps I’m merely woefully inexperienced in these matters,” he said, the tense sarcastic edge of his voice coming clearly even through the cloak. “But I would have called this a truly remarkable case of corruption.